At the far end of the table, three youngish men had already formed a clump together and begun roaring with laughter. They had the air of what child-psychologists call an exclusive playgroup, collectively pledged to take up with no one else. Clazy conjectured that they too had been elected to their fellowships fairly recently. Would he be so out of condition – so patently bursting his buttons – in a couple of years’ time? It was another dejecting thought, and he looked elsewhere.
Some of his colleagues were pitching themselves carelessly into the first chair that offered. Others were making a cautious and crablike approach to desired positions. A few were executing what they supposed to be unobtrusive retreats from undesired proximities. He himself, having been pre-empted by the shaggy man, was not involved in these anxieties on the present occasion. So he was an onlooker. And for some reason, psychologists came again into his head. All this would indubitably make an illuminating study worked at through one of those one-way observation windows they went in for nowadays.
But this odd notion made Clazy decently uneasy.
After all, he was going to be one of these chaps for quite a long time – for keeps, indeed, if the thing were brutally put. So he continued his observations in a spirit of proper humility. When nearly all were seated, the scene began to resemble an early phase in Musical Chairs some seconds after the piano stops tinkling. Four or five men were left scurrying round the backs of their seated fellows, searching for a vacant place. And it seemed certain that there was a place too few. Presently only one man was left – a little shrunken creature with a vast domed forehead suggesting massive intellect. He scampered all round the table in painful agitation, and it really looked as if he would have to go home. But there was one chair left after all, and he sank into it panting and trembling. Nobody took any notice of him.
“Port?” The shaggy man turned to Clazy with a shout of brisk hospitality. “Or madeira or claret? We have claret in the winter terms, you know; and then in summer we have sauterne.”
“Claret, please,” Clazy said.
The shaggy man poured Clazy a glass of port. It seemed impossible to tell whether this represented some disciplinary act or simple inadvertence. Clazy eyed the glass in dismay. He didn’t find even vintage port particularly disagreeable to drink, but a single glass meant a sleepless night. On claret he could happily approach the fringes of inebriety and then sleep like an angel. Not that angels slept. They wept. “Thank you,” Clazy said.
“You know,” the shaggy man shouted, “what Bentley said about port?”
This seemed to Clazy rather a surprising question. He inferred from it that the shaggy man was a physicist or even an engineer. Perhaps he had developed his bellow through long contending with donkey-engines. No one with an education could suppose you mightn’t know a story as familiar as that. But Clazy, mindful of the long years ahead, smiled companionably, as one who is appealed to on familiar but perennially pleasing ground. “Yes,” he said, “I remember that one.”
The shaggy man looked incredulous. It occurred to Clazy that his question had been asked in a tone for which the Romans possessed an equivalent in the interrogatory particle num. The shaggy man had – what was surely unreasonable – expected the answer, no. Or perhaps – it was because Clazy had so recently been an examinee that this explanation came into his head – the shaggy man suspected him of claiming unjustly knowledge he didn’t really possess. Clazy hastened to dissipate this damaging suspicion on the part of so senior a colleague. “Bentley said, didn’t he,” he asked, “that claret would be port if it could?”
The shaggy man frowned. “Bentley never said that,” he shouted – so loudly that it was incomprehensible everybody didn’t stare at him. “That wouldn’t be Bentley’s style at all.”
This monstrous contention annoyed Clazy. He gulped some port. “But,” he said with careful mildness, “I’m quite certain he did. Or – to be more accurate – I’m quite certain that Bentley is said to have said it.”
“I’d suppose it rather early days, Clazy, for you to possess that sort of certainty about Bentley.” The shaggy man was now openly displeased.
Clazy stared at him. “I admit I can’t remember if it’s mentioned in Monk’s Life. But I’ve certainly read it in Jebb’s little book.”
“Monk? Jebb?” The shaggy man roared with laughter, so that the table shook and the wine trembled in the decanters ranged before him. “Good God, we don’t take any stock of that Bentley here! Our Bentley isn’t a rascally Master of a Cambridge college. He’s the common-room butler. And a man to be civil to, my dear fellow. If you speak him fair, he’ll rustle you up a bottle of Chateau Yquem, or something of that sort, the next time you give a dinner for ladies.”
“I see.” Clazy didn’t in fact at all see himself giving dinners, with or without Chateau Yquem, for ladies.
“And of a good year, too. There’s almost nothing you can drink, you know, that is more at the mercy of the weather. It’s essential, you’ll remember, that the grapes should be over-ripe but still perfectly sound. A wet vintage, and the stuff’s done for.”
“Yes, of course.” Clazy heard himself with horror give this insincere assent to an issue which had never in sober fact engaged his attention. “Just what did Bentley, your Bentley—I mean our Bentley—say?”
“About port? He said, ‘It does make some gentlemen heavy rather quickly, sir.’ “
“Oh.” Bentley’s aphorism, although perhaps usefully to be laid up in the mind, didn’t immediately strike Clazy as particularly remarkable.
“Bentley has a genius for the right word. And here he restores it to us, you may say, straight from the Latin. Vino gravis.”
“Yes, I see. Or straight from the Greek. Oinobares.”
Clazy was rather pleased with this. It was the beginning of the sort of conversation he had supposed one had in senior common rooms. A bit pedantic, perhaps. But, one might say, in character.
“Just that.” And at this the shaggy man turned briskly away from him and talked to his other neighbour.
Clazy was left for a time to his own reflections. These turned now not upon whether he was real but upon whether, perhaps, he wasn’t like the other boys.
He hadn’t at all the habit of this speculation. The question had assailed him rather powerfully, indeed, at the age of nine, when he had been abruptly bundled across the Border and into an English private school. That had been largely a matter of the unexpected discovery that he had a strong Edinburgh accent. It hadn’t lasted, any more than the accent had – a circumstance, this latter one, which he found himself at times regretting. In the generation of Oxford philosophers to which he now belonged – or at least in the generation hard upon which his was respectfully following – a virtual identity of speculative views was so much the rule that it would have been a relief to have at least a few idiosyncratic vowels and consonants. He would certainly have said that what at times oppressed him was a sense of being awfully like a good many other people rather than of being awfully different from them. For instance, there had been those three other short-listed persons. They had all four, surely, sat waiting in their gowns like peas in a pod. And he had at the time supposed that the atmosphere of a courteously dissimulated mild dismay in which his own interview was conducted had proceeded from the interviewers having precisely this sense of the matter. But now he was feeling rather as he had felt at nine years old. Perhaps it was the port.
Clazy noticed that he had emptied his glass. And he noticed that he was quite glad to see the decanter going its second round. Already he had drunk rather a lot that evening – having been to a sherry party and then having had a good deal of burgundy in Hall. He wondered how rapidly all that came on one.
The shaggy man’s averted shoulder contrived somehow to express permanent alienation. Clazy cautiously inspected his other neighbour. He was only a little older than himself, and he certainly hadn’t been on the interviewing committee. Clazy would have remembered, if nothing else, that pen
dent lock of lank black hair. It hung low over a dessert plate upon which its owner had contrived the considerable feat of neatly dissecting the segments of an orange exclusively through the agency of a small silver knife and fork. He was now applying to the further task of dealing with the individual segments all the exquisite muscular co-ordination and nervous intensity which one associates with a crucial moment in the game of spillikins. It was with what might have been called a purely therapeutic intention that Clazy – rashly, as he instantly felt – spoke; it seemed, somehow, only an act of common humanity to attempt the relief of such an intolerable tension. “May I introduce myself?” he asked. “I’m the new philosophy tutor, Ian Clazy.”
The black lock swayed violently – it might have been the tail, Clazy thought, of an alarmed Arab steed – and there was a little disorganised clatter of silver on porcelain. Clazy, glancing aside in embarrassment, caught the eye – assuredly the disapproving eye – of an impassive and tail-coated figure standing in a corner of the common room. It was certainly Bentley – he of the genius for the right word. Probably it was an appalling solicism thus to speak out of turn. But the dark young man had politely put down his knife and fork. When he spoke, it was with an effect of anxious courtesy tempered by stealth.
“How do you do?” he said. “I am Alan Ormerod. Politics.” He grabbed his fork again and returned to spillikins. Venturing into speech had made him faintly blush.
The exchange seemed to be over. Clazy found to his surprise that he was looking impatiently past Ormerod and up the table. The decanter was stationary at some neglectful person’s right hand. In x years – say forty years – Clazy would be sitting where the shaggy man now sat, and – more vigilant than the shaggy man – would be calling the neglectful person’s attention sharply to his lapse. At the moment, this prophetic vision nerved him to make another approach to Ormerod. “Have you been here long?” he asked.
Ormerod had speared a segment of orange, and with the point of his knife had almost succeeded in enucleating its second pip. But now the knife made a random jab and he gave Clazy a swift glance of naked panic. “Six years,” he said. The words seemed to Clazy to come to him in a cautious whisper – but that, he reflected with professional acumen, might be a matter of his own fancy. Certainly Ormerod was conceiving it his duty to achieve, at all costs, further utterance. Beneath their pendent lock, his features had gone immobile in concentration, and he had the slight frown of one who is rapidly reviewing, and choosing from among, a wide diversity of intellectual topics. “Weren’t you at Queen’s with Bones?” he asked.
“Oh, no.” The question was clearly equivalent to “Weren’t you at Merton with T. S. Eliot?” or “Weren’t you at Wadham with John Simon and F. E. Smith?” So Clazy hastened to make emphatic and circumstantial his disclaiming of the distinction. “I was at Edinburgh before I went up to Balliol.”
“Edinburgh?” Ormerod seemed to have heard of the place. Just.
“It’s my home town. I went to the University there when I left Loretto.”
“Loretto?” This was the same response. Ormerod’s blush had faded. Indeed, he was now rather pale beneath the strain of all this human communion. “I’ve had … pupils from … Gordonstoun,” he managed to say. “And one … from Fettes.”
It wasn’t information that gave much conversational foothold, and Clazy thought he’d better resign Ormerod to his orange. It seemed to represent the slightly less exhausting struggle. Besides which, the port had now come round. Clazy picked up the decanter. It drained itself just before he had filled his glass.
“A buzz!”
Somebody quite far down the table had given this shout like a hunting cry. The shaggy man, his attention caught, grabbed the decanter and held it high in air.
The impassive Bentley started into activity. A second and empty glass appeared beside Clazy, together with a second decanter. He saw that he had suddenly become a centre for the cordial interest of the whole table. He saw also that the second decanter – for reasons, he felt, too obscurely technical to be penetrated – had very little port left in it. He began to fill the empty glass. This decanter too drained itself when there was about an eighth of the glass still unfilled.
“A double buzz!” This time several voices had taken up the cry. It was like a presage of doom. Bentley, whose decorous expression had now vanished behind a delighted smile, produced a third empty glass and a third decanter. This decanter was almost full. Clazy filled the third glass and passed the decanter. He was convinced – with what he knew to be a childish conviction – that all this must be achieved with an easy nonchalance. He so achieved it. The interest in him largely dissipated itself. He was left contemplating the situation.
It was a situation consisting simply of one glass of port already drunk and three to be drunk now. The glasses were rather large – not at all the sort of thing you got shoved at you over the bar in a pub. Total, say just on half a bottle. Perhaps he would have a chance of surreptitiously pouring a gill or so into a spittoon or an aspidistra. But of course the common room was without either of these amenities. Perhaps, with an appearance of immense ingenuousness, he could push the two untouched glasses over to the shaggy man and say, “Have mine.” It would become a story gratefully retained in the later nineteen-nineties. “You won’t remember a crusty old chap called Clazy. It’s said that the first night he came into common room he got a double buzz. And he …”
Clazy became aware that a little interest in him still remained. He was being addressed from across the table by an elderly man outlandishly dressed in a decrepit Coldstream blazer. This was a circumstance horrifying in itself. “All elephants enjoy omelettes,” the elderly man said.
There was a lot of animated talk going on, and the shaggy man was shouting louder than ever. So it was hard to hear anybody distinctly. And the elderly man talked pretty well without opening his mouth. That was all. Clazy’s intellect told him it was no more than that. But he felt irrational alarm, all the same. “I beg your pardon?” he said.
The elderly man frowned impatiently. “Day and dark. Dark and day and dusk?” The intonation was interrogative.
“Yes,” Clazy said at a venture, and gulped port.
The elderly man’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. He seemed to be casting round for anything which, in the light of so disastrous a reply, could tactfully and decently be rejoined. “Buying bays and gulling gells,” he said rapidly. “All unbespokables each made amenable.” He leant expectantly towards Clazy with a hand cupped behind an ear.
For a moment Clazy indulged a wild hope that this was really a rational conversation about Finnegans Wake. But then why had it begun with a perfectly intelligible remark on the tastes of elephants? He gulped more port. “I don’t really know,” he said desperately. “I haven’t really thought.” Perhaps this was some sort of initiatory rite, confronted by which he was displaying a pitiful lack of resource. Perhaps the idea was that he should himself reply in fluent Jabberwocky of his own.
But the elderly man removed his hand from his ear. He nodded and smiled – a warm, satisfied, fatherly smile. “Splendid!” he said distinctly, and turned away to speak to someone else.
The lank-locked Ormerod had finished his orange. But he wasn’t any less tense; in fact, he was more so. By an uneasy sort of empathy Clazy could feel all the muscles in his neighbour’s body contracting one by one, as if he were preparing to go off at the crack of a pistol. Then, with what was obviously a supreme effort of sheer moral courage, Ormerod got to his feet, articulated some sort of apology to the shaggy man, gave Clazy a quick terrified smile, and left the room.
Clazy took a wider survey. There wasn’t much else for him to do. The three men who had been boisterously laughing at the end of the table were now whispering – and to achieve this were leaning so far towards each other that their heads were virtually among the walnut shells. One of them chanced to catch Clazy’s eye, and it immediately came into Clazy’s head that the whispering was about him. Thi
s grotesque fantasy was extremely unnerving; it suggested that he possessed a hitherto unsuspected paranoic strain. And certainly it made him self-conscious. He found that, every thirty seconds or so and with absolute regularity, he was raising his port glass to his lips and taking a sip. He must present the appearance of a particularly primitive automaton.
And of course the port wasn’t doing him any good. Whereas most of the people round about seemed to be benefiting from it all the time. Conversation was animated. Even the homuncule with the enormous forehead, who had appeared rather silent earlier, was now talking rapidly. Rapidly and ceaselessly. Strangely ceaselessly … Clazy leaned forward and strained his ears. No sound was actually coming from the homuncule’s lips, although they were working with preternatural mobility. He was probably enunciating to himself mathematical formulae of the most extreme complexity. Or perhaps he was in the grip of religious enthusiasm and engaged, secreto, in private ejaculation and prayer … The remorseless clockwork operating Clazy made him raise his glass again. This time he caught another eye.
It was an eye – Clazy was conscious at once – that somehow marked off its owner from everybody else in the room. And at the moment it was bent upon Clazy in a cool detached observation which was at the same time sympathetic and even – ever so faintly – conspiratorial. Clazy knew this man’s name, Charles Peverett, and had read one of his books: a lucid and incisive discussion of the Roman fiscal system under the Antonines. So it was pleasant when Peverett followed up his glance with a friendly smile, rose, strolled round the table, and dropped into Ormerod’s abandoned chair. “One sees it all as a bit mad at first,” he murmured whimsically. “But the acuteness of the perception wears off in time. You’ll probably find that the first five years are the worst.”
Clazy laughed. “They say that about penal servitude, don’t they?”
The Man Who Wrote Detective Stories Page 11